Survey
question (Google Form)! Both Fano and Hellerstein et al. discuss consequences
of the computer utility for “community,” especially in Fano’s concluding
section and the last paragraphs of Hellerstein et al.’s §3.2. How do you
think Fano would react to Hellerstein et al.’s notion of API simplicity
“chang[ing] the mindset of the developer community”?

Survey question (Google Form)! If Xen were part of the software management plane for a serverless computing offering, such as Amazon Lambda, which of its components would manage starting and stopping serverless functions? Outline at a high level how you think the start process would work.

Survey question (Google Form!) The KVM paper we read was published soon after KVM was developed; Firecracker is a recent KVM-based technology. Name some problems the KVM developers have addressed since the KVM paper’s publication, based on the evidence of Firecracker.

Survey questions (Google Form!)1. I was very surprised that Google’s “infrastructure update in February 2018” made coldstart latencies 4x slower on average! Why might this have occurred?
2. Describe something else the authors discovered that surprised you.

Note: There’s a lot to read here! Don’t worry and don’t get bogged down; the numpywren paper has some linear algebra stuff not particularly important for our purposes.

Survey question (Google Form!) Both papers end with some suggestions for future work for serverless providers and for serverless users. (As have some of the other papers we’ve read.) Respond to these suggestions. (Example jumping-off points: Do the suggestions overlap? Which suggestions seem most difficult, or to require research?)

Survey question (Google Form!) ExCamera inspired pywren (see p374). Contrast the designs of ExCamera with pywren or numpywren (your choice). For instance, does one of the systems use more AWS services than the other?

Survey question (Google Form!) Section 2.1 lists four requirements for ephemeral storage. How do these requirements map onto features of the Pocket system design described in Section 3.2 and Figure 4? Which systems features correspond to which requirements?

Survey question (Google Form!) Which Linux container/namespace features correspond most closely to resource containers? Which Linux container/namespace features provide features not supported by resource containers?

Survey questions (Google Form!) Discuss how the Spectre results impact the arguments in the microservice paper. Are Spectre-based arguments the best arguments against language-only microservice isolation, or are there others?

Survey question (Google Form!) The Borg design defines a number of abstractions and algorithms, but these algorithms include many special cases for specific parameters. Describe two or more special cases and explain why you think these special cases are important.

Survey question (Google Form!) The paper gives multiple syntaxes for composing serverless functions, including Table 1 (BNF), Table 2 (JavaScript), and sections 2.1–2.3 (OpenWhisk). Describe how these syntaxes can be translated into one another, or why that is not possible.

Note! This paper has an extensive appendix that you do not need to read.

Survey questions (Google Form!) (1) Does the SPL programming language solve the serverless trilemma? Why or why not? (2) Some SPL programs would be easier for a service provider to run than others. Describe an SPL program that would be expensive or difficult for the service provider to run.

Survey questions (Google Form!) (1) Bolt can “correctly identif[y] the job’s resource characteristics” 385 out 436 times. What does this mean, specifically? Why does it matter? (2) Figure 12 is the heart of the evaluation. What is an anomaly you observe in this figure?

Survey question! Applications orchestrate multiple serverless functions in several different ways—using an orchestration language (Amazon Step Functions, the SPL), using a scheduler (gg, numpywren), or dynamically (OpenWhisk conductors). Pick one of these and describe how it could be adapted to Canopy.

Survey question! (1) Some aspects of Potemkin apply to serverless deployments, some do not. Name a specific aspect of serverless computing that Potemkin could improve, and describe which Potemkin ideas would help. (2) Name a component of Potemkin that would not be useful in serverless computing. Explain briefly.

Survey questions! (1) Which of the “Limitations of Today’s Serverless Computing Platforms” does your project address, and how? (2) How does your project’s direction correspond with the suggestions in “What Serverless Computing Should Become”?